Tea Conversion

Two lovely teas today. The first was an East Friesen black tea, and we had that as per custom with milk and a bit of cracking sugar over breakfast. We drank it while trying to parse tomorrow’s Advent Calendar door. (They aren’t marked and there are all sorts of puzzles to work out where you go next. We aren’t terrible clever about it, but it’s fun.)

Later we made David’s Tea’s Hazelnut chocolate. We put a bit of milk in the first half-cup, because sometimes black tea with chocolate tastes better that way. But this isn’t one of those teas. The milk mutes the hazelnut flavour and even some of the chocolate. Drunk black, it’s a much richer, complex black tea. We enjoyed it lots.

We can’t say we’ve always loved teas with chocolate, but over the years we’ve come round, especially for ones this nice. And on that theme, here’s a poem by G. K. Chesterton.

The Convert
G. K. Chesterton

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white.
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

Incidentally, we always used to say that if we were going to convert anyone to our particular brand of High Anglicanism we’d do it with cups of tea. It seems much more civilized than trying to explain scripture with minimum qualification. And anyway, tea is the eighth sacrament.

But mostly we thought that bit of optimism about right for the shortest day of the year. See you tomorrow, when the days will be drawing out again. Not that we’ll notice.